When randomness takes over

This is just a very quick post. Those of you know who know me, know that I’ve been working quite hard of late. This has left me rather tired, sleep deprived and writing posts of even less than usual (just see below for examples). One other effect this has had is to introduce a wide variety of fairly random thoughts into my head.

For example, I was recently overcome by a sudden desire to watch Star Trek: The Next Generation. This hasn’t been on tv for years, and I think it’s high time it made a comeback on BBC2. Of course, the Q episodes were always the best.

I was also thinking about the nature of revolution. This was partly triggered by watching Che at the weekend, and comparing Che to Jesus. While vastly different in their methodologies, both were revolutionaries in their time, killed while relatively young and were motivated by love. I think love is what distinguishes between a revolutionary and a terrorist, a theme on many people’s minds at the moment.

The other thought I had was on the word “confession,” particularly in terms of liturgical creeds. Now I have never been a fan of liturgy, I still regard it as a poor substitute for thinking. But the nature of having a creed labelled as a confession implies to me that someone is “owning up” and admitting something to be true which hurts their pride. In our modern setting, the word has acquired a legalistic meaning relating to guilt, but this is not what the Christian confessions are about. They are about humility. Nomatter how much we may like to set ourselves up in loco deus, we are children of God. In what is dubbed “Peter’s confession of Christ,” Peter was not making a declaration of something new; he was speaking something true that was already known, but which he had not had the guts to admit out loud before.